


Remember Me.

by nimkeys



Category: Hiveswap, Homestuck
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-18
Packaged: 2019-09-21 15:13:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17046032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimkeys/pseuds/nimkeys
Summary: An alien crash landed in the neighborhood a couple of perigrees ago.Or had one?All at once, nobody could seem to remember.





	Remember Me.

 

     A newly formed caliginous couple could’ve sworn that somebody had helped get them together, but for the life of them couldn’t remember who.

 

     One morning, a cerulean-blooded boy found one his hoodies had mysteriously disappeared. And had he dropped his old palmhusk into the river underneath his hive at some point? He couldn’t recall doing so, and yet there it was, sitting in a bowl of rice to soak the water back out of its fried circuits.

 

     When a young bronze’s lusus was nearly taken away by some bandits, she had managed to save her. How had she fought off a dozen other trolls all by herself…? She obviously managed some way or another, because by her side her beloved companion slept as if nothing had ever even transpired.

 

     A small jadeblood girl remembers having someone else to roleplay her favorite book series with her, even though they hadn’t been terribly good at it. Yet none of the forums she frequented showed any signs of a recent roleplay thread. She could remember walking back to the caverns one night after sneaking out for a convention she hadn’t ultimately went to. Why didn’t she wind up going? Had she really made it so far out and back all on her own?

 

     38 trolls had awoken one evening with vague memories. A strange sort of longing. The kind that people feel when they wake up after a melancholy dream. Except unlike a feeling from a dream, the sensation never dissipated. To some, it wasn’t much more than a fleeting feeling to be later brushed off as some weird déjà vu. To others, it felt like an enormous, empty space was left inside of them. Regardless of which emotions each of them felt, they shared one thing in common: none of them knew why.

 

\---

 

     Despite how much she hated going outdoors, Tyzias couldn’t fight the strange, overpowering urge to go and  investigate the abandoned surveillance tower on the outskirts of town. All the way up the sheer mountainside she cursed under her breath, mumbling about how stupid and pointless this all was. She peered her eyes cautiously over the top as she reached it, and saw nothing but a lot of dust and broken equipment. After deeming it safe, she pulled herself the rest of the way onto the cold, dilapidated floor. As she searched each corner of the room, she had no idea what she might be looking for in a place like this. It was obvious that nobody had been in here in ages, let alone Tyzias herself, and yet it somehow felt so familiar. Why did this dusty, forsaken, cobweb-ridden old building feel so inviting to her?

     Tyzias searched for who-knows-what for who could say how long until the unforgiving Alternian sun threatened to come back up over the horizon. She sighed, taking a long and defeated swig from her mug, gazing mindlessly into the empty vessel once she’d finished. She swirled the trace amounts of water around its porcelain bottom, wondering why she was even out here wasting her time. Her gut had pointed her here, and yet--

     Wait.

     What was that?

     Something flickered in the corner of her vision, and she snapped her now wide eyes to its source. But there was nothing there. As her vision landed on the nonexistent object, another flicker appeared just out of her direct line of sight. She whipped towards this one too, but nothing. Another flicker. Panicked, she continued to whip her head around, trying desperately to clearly see whatever it was that was in the room with her.

     “wwwwho’s there?!” she croaked. No response. She was shaking a bit by this point, clutching her mug in both hands against her chest as she continued to try and look around. She remained where she was, feet frozen to the ground and trying to figure out just what was going on.

     She began to slowly make sense of the shapes around her. They were all stationary, and they all became clearer the more she didn’t directly look at them, somehow. One looked like… a pile of junk, from what she could tell from the peripheral angle at which she had to view everything. A pile of junk, and yet still deliberately shaped into something. Some kind of freeform art, she guessed? Whatever it was, she could see it, but her hands moved through it at her attempts to touch it. Whatever, this debatably bad art piece wasn’t ringing any bells to her anyway.

     The next thing she noticed was a whole lot of other junk placed sporadically all over the room. Not art junk, though. Things like empty water bottles, remnants of food and food packaging. Had someone… been living here? It was just then that Tyzias saw one last large something in the corner of her eye. Whatever it was, it was making her blood pusher race for some reason. She reached out. She could touch this one. And as she grasped it, it ceased its odd flickering and she could look at it just like anything else.

     It was… a blanket? An ordinary blanket. Unable to explain her irrational new restlessness, she turned the fabric over in her hands several times trying to figure out its significance. For some reason, she felt as if she had slept under it before. Like she had sat in this exact spot with it draped over her tired shoulders. It smelled oddly familiar, like somebody dear to her. Stelsa? No… Tagora? God, no. She couldn’t remember. She just couldn’t remember. The memory was just out of her desperate grasp. She clung onto the fabric so hard that her knuckles began to turn white. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to make some sense of anything. And as she did, something or someone in the far reaches of the universe was calling out to her, without words seeming to say  _ “ _ I was here. You were here. Please try to remember. Please don’t forget.”

     And then, just as soon as the flickering objects had come, they were gone again. The blanket vanished from her grasp. As Tyzias clawed desperately at the air where it once was, she suddenly couldn’t even remember the smell anymore. The strange force reaching out to her subsided, as if the universe was tidying up its mess. Exhausted and now with more questions in her mind than answers, she slumped to the floor and buried her head in her hands. The floor was freezing, but she couldn’t bother caring as she started to cry for reasons she couldn’t even really discern.

     She feels a blanket being draped over her shoulders.

 

\---

 

     Taxes. They’re certainly something that no troll enjoys doing, but Tagora Gorjek couldn’t deny how much he absolutely relished in how organized and prepared he was when the time to file them came around at the office twice per sweep. They weren’t something every troll had to worry about dealing with, but money tended to make its way into the young teal’s place of work quite often. And if there’s profit being made, the Empress is always there to nab a piece of it for herself.

     Some members of the office had methods of organization, others simply shoved their years’ worth of receipts into an old box to be dealt with and sorted all at once in a stressful bi-annual ordeal. Tagora was never one so foolish- he kept every record of money in and out, not only by category but in chronological order as well. Personal investments, business purchases, deductibles, you name it. When it came down to it, Tagora was un-rivaled (except by maybe Stelsa) in how swiftly he could get everything sorted away and out of his hair for another half a sweep.

     Except this time. This time, he was perhaps the last of the teals in the office to get everything done.

     One incorrectly placed receipt normally wouldn’t have thrown him for such a loop.  He would have shrugged it off as a moment of thoughtlessness and re-sorted it to be in the pile it needed to be in. But something about this particular receipt left him restless and upset. No matter how hard Tagora thought, he couldn’t remember why he had made this particular purchase, and something about it irked him beyond what he knew was reasonable thought.

     On the 12th bilunar perigree of the 6th dark season's equinox, he'd bought a coffee machine. Not even that long ago. It had been sorted under personal investments, implying he hadn’t bought it for a client or for any other business-related purposes. The thing was, he couldn’t remember purchasing a coffee machine at all, and yet there his signature was on the receipt. Where had this coffee machine gone? The answer felt so important, and Tagora couldn’t figure out why.

     He started with his personal filing cabinets, thumbing through whatever documentation he had of every professional interaction he’d had for the past half a sweep, hoping to suddenly recall purchasing a gift to boost up a professional relationship. When nothing surfaced, he reluctantly began knocking on the office doors of his co-workers. Stelsa, Tegiri, and Tirona were all varying levels of completely un-helpful. Tyzias appeared to be out sick with a cold.

     He then began making calls. He dialed at least ten other trolls he could remember doing business with recently, and all came up empty. When the rest of his leads ran dry, he dialed the number on his receipt, drumming his claws on his desk impatiently as the dial tone rang back into his ear. The voice on the other end was robotic and gave him options correlating to numbers on his palmhusk’s keypad. He endured the painfully slow process of inputting his very specific request and the very specific item he had purchased into the phone before finally being told that his purchase ID could not be found. He meticulously re-entered the number several more times, but all of his attempts were met with failure.

     The store’s website was also of little help. They apparently no longer carried the model of coffee machine that he had purchsed. In fact, they appeared to carry no coffee machines at all.

     No matter how many times Tagora tried to put it out of his mind and get back to work that was of immediate consequence, he just couldn’t seem to. When he looked at the crumpled piece of paper on his desk, it made him feel… empty. His thinkpan was trying desperately to connect it with the other strange, vague feelings he was experiencing, but nothing was making sense. Memories that were fragmented and felt more like near-forgotten dreams were swimming through his mind. A scuttlebuggy accident, some indiscernable person crawling away from the aftermath, a new friend, a coffee machine.

     For what seemed like an eternity, Tagora just sat in his office chair doing nothing but thinking. It all seemed so close to rushing back, and that if he let the memories slip for even an instant, they’d never come back again. Something he couldn’t explain was telling him not to stop trying. Something out there desperately wanted him to remember. He continued to think, getting up only occasionally to go double check files that he wanted certain he was remembering correctly. Otherwise, he remained in his chair.

     A knock on his office door made him nearly jump out of his skin. All at once, he noticed that the sun had already risen and set again. He had been up all day at the office, and it was already time to be back at work. Whatever thoughts had been so prevalently dominating his mind for the past few hours suddenly vanished. Where he could’ve sworn there was a receipt on his desk moments before, there was nothing to be found. He couldn’t even remember what it was for. His door then slowly cracked open, and Stelsa’s concerned face appeared from behind it. She made a note of the newly formed dark circles under Tagora’s eyes, and gently asked him if he would like a cup of coffee. He declined.

 

\---

 

     Up on Alternia’s green moon, a human sat curled in an office swivel chair, their knees tucked against their body inside of an oversized hoodie. The room was dark aside from the stark white light emanating from the computer screen in front of them. They’d been staring at it for hours on end now, unable to make sense of the webcomic that they’d been promised would provide the answers they sought. Absolutely nothing seemed to correlate until recently, when they’d reached the “act” in the comic where Alternia was finally introduced. But even that provided little help; the trolls that had been introduced meant nothing to them, from what they could tell. Their names were unfamiliar, none of them appeared to live anywhere near Outglut, and any information about the planet and troll culture was either irrelevant or already known from their many perigrees living there firsthand.

     The human sighed and swiveled around in their chair, frustrated and with a minor headache from staring at a screen for so long. They didn’t want to think about these fake humans or these fake trolls anymore. They wanted their real friends back, even if their surface desire to be chummy with them had been taken away. More than anything, they just wanted to remember what it felt like to love the people they’d spent so much time getting to know and care about. At this point, it wasn’t missing them that hurt. It was being unable to miss them that somehow hurt far more. Perhaps the worst was knowing that their purpose now fulfilled, their friends had forgotten them too. Had all their troll friends simply forgotten a name? A face? Or everything? Did they feel the same sense of unease and longing, or were they just going on with their lives as if nothing was out of the ordinary? The human couldn’t decide which was worse.

     One by one, they tried remembering all of the different friends they’d made along their Alternian journey. Did it even matter anymore?  Of course it did. Why? Because they’d been on Alternia. They’d met a lot of people and affected their lives. The hoodie of a cerulean boy they’d brought with them was tangible proof, no matter how small. Whether or not their journey was affected by some omnipotent force didn’t matter. It never had. The places they’d gone, the things they’d done, and the memories they’d created were still there in their mind, and that’s what made it important.

     With nothing else left but their own thoughts, the human reached out to the universe, hoping that their voice could somehow be heard.

     “Don’t forget me.”

A tealblood girl feels the sudden urge to visit the old abandoned watchtower on the outskirts of the neighborhood.

     “Please, don’t forget me.”

Her coworker finds an old, misplaced receipt for a coffee machine in his filing cabinet.

     “I was there.”

The tealbood girl finds a blanket on the floor, flickering in and out of existence. She recognizes it.

     “Please try to remember.”

Her coworker pulls a sleepless day, desperately attempting to recall who he’d bought a coffee machine for.

     38 trolls had awoken one evening with an inexplicable sad feeling. Some pushed it back in their minds as far as they could manage. Others sought answers to their questions. Some didn’t have tangible questions to ask in the first place. But they all knew one thing: they wanted answers.

     “We want to remember.”

A human, far from home, remembers for a moment what it felt like to crave companionship.

     “We’re trying to remember.”

Fragmented pieces of reality almost reshape themselves.

     “Who are you? What are you? What’s happening to us?”

The human buries themselves in their sweater, and wishes they had someone there to hug.

     “What’s going to happen now?”

The universe tries to tidy and correct itself, but there’s too many pieces strewn about to feasibly clean up.

     38 trolls and a human had awoken one evening with an ache in their chests. It was an ache that longed for something they were now missing. It was an ache that remained because their wills would not allow it to dissipate despite the laws of reality wishing otherwise. It was an ache for something they knew was now missing.

It was an ache for FRIENDSHIP.

**Author's Note:**

> I've never posted a fanfic before in my life!! LKDFJDJLKRDJFKD... I hope you enjoy, and a special thank you to the friendsim team! It's been a wild ride.


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